Chicken Little and the Ceiling has fallen down. aka Call the Cops.

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What to do when your house starts to collapse. I have learned a lesson that hopefully you won’t need yourself. We lived in an old building very near to my children’s school so that they had the unusual experience of being able to walk to school (summer and winter) in Abu Dhabi. While the building was old we didn't really expect the structural problem that arose 3 years into our tenancy there. The ceiling collapsed in one bedroom. 

Fortunately nobody was under it at the time as it could have been serious or even fatal. At first the false ceiling sagged. This was a wooden frame ceiling, not the suspended ceiling tile type. We didn't realise, and couldn't see, that what was happening was that all of the concrete beneath the steel reinforcing of the concrete roof was falling off the ceiling and weighing down the false ceiling. Once the weight became great enough the whole lot just caved in. There had been an earthquake a week or so before in Iran, and the neighbours (adjoining wall) had been doing some renovations so either could have nudged the rotting concrete collapse to start. Who knows? Anyway down it came.

Now the lesson here is what you should do about it. As the lease is in my work’s name, I contacted them and the maintenance company that looks after the house. The maintenance company came promptly, took about a week to knock out all the remaining concrete under the bars, then proceeded to board it up again with another false ceiling! That was there fix, and they glibly told me that it happened all the time.  Now of course I wondered why that room had a false ceiling in it in the first place as not all rooms  upstairs did, so I automatically assumed that it meant that there had been a previous lesser issue which they had covered up. There were other rooms downstairs that had some false ceilings too, which immediately came under suspicion. We didn't feel safe with the repair (now only half thickness of roof) and with the suspicion about other rooms. In the end we got to move out to temporary accommodation and eventually to get a new house. The issue became the getting out of the existing lease, and getting a refund for the remainder of the lease.  The details of that are not worth mentioning here, but the significant factor is that it turns out that I “should have called the Civil Defence force” to show them the damage at the time. In other words instead of calling the maintenance company I needed to call the cops!

The pictures and everything else were irrelevant. I needed an official report. Just like a ding in your car, or a stone chip on your windscreen. And of course it was my fault because I didn't know to do it. The maintenance company, and the housing section of my work didn't know to do it, but I was expected to know! And getting it checked out months later when we are fighting over the refund is too late.

The lesson – if something goes wrong with your house, and you don’t want to be held responsible – call the cops. They will determine which service is needed. Get that official piece of paper that says someone has looked at it.